Some Thoughts on AI and Meta's Recent Decision

I didn’t post last week because I’ve been doing some self-reflection about the current state of things, and I want to share those thoughts. I am specifically thinking about the Instagram issue and how Meta has decided that our using its platform gave them permission to own rights to our work retroactively. With the state of things on the internet and the modern-day attitudes towards art, I find myself growingly discontented with how art is seen in general and how artists are treated.

Historically, art was respected as a science and a hallmark of culture. There has always been “high brow” art and “low brow” art, or accessible or inaccessible art, and the attitudes towards each are different, but by and large the concept of art and the artist was respect and acknowledgement of skill. These days, art is not see this way but as a commodity, a trend, a means of advertising products; art can be anything, so why not a machine-generated hallucination? What makes a computer-generated image any less valuable than a human one? They’re both pictures, sometimes I even prefer the computer generated ones. Why should I care about that one artist’s struggle when I can just input their work into a machine and get everything I could possibly want for a fraction of the price?
And why should we care? Why should it bother the masses that a corporation has taken work that artists voluntarily uploaded onto it to create more images? Why should it bother us when a faceless hopeful puts down their pen for the last time and gives up? Isn’t this the democratization of art?
This is not the democratization of art; it is capitalism eating itself.
When all is said and done, humans will always make art. We may not post it online, we may not showcase it in galleries, we may not even call it art ourselves, but creating is a part of human nature. And it is that human nature that Meta and all the corporations that are using artists’ work without permission are dependant on. They have built their unholy fortunes off of artists’ work, and now they’re going to do what all capitalists do: they’re going to cut out the workers and take all the wealth for themselves.
The state of the middle and lower classes have been steadily declining as mega-corporations continue to funnel wealth from us into their own pockets. This has been going on for decades, and we are going to reach a breaking point. I don’t know what it will look like (though I have a guess), but change is going to happen one way or another because you cannot continue to crush the masses under your heel and expect us to keep silent forever. And if we do, there goes their only source of income. By then, they’ll have siphoned all the money from us and be left with that and nothing but an empty empire and a ruined planet. It’s bad for business to destroy your suppliers and customer’s livelihoods.
And when it’s all done, artists will still make art.
Meta knows what it’s doing is unacceptable and wrong - they’ve only given people in legally-protected countries the option to opt-out. If they actually cared about us or our art, they would have made it opt-in across the board. Meta doesn’t care about its users, neither does Adobe, Wacom, or any other company that have used or included AI in their programs/campaigns to skim off a few bucks from their costs. That couple of thousand dollars Wacom saved with that horrendous AI-generated dragon this year could have gone into the community and reaped benefits multiple times over. Adobe has destroyed its customers’ trust multiple times. I don’t think any of us ever trusted Meta, but with the most recent information about their theft of millions of art pieces as well as suppressing minorities in favour of accounts that will make them a few extra bucks while refusing to show art in favour of mindless reels that retain zombie-like attention, I think the exodus of 500,000 artists says a lot.
And Meta will not stop. Adobe will not stop. None of them will because they do not care about us, only the money they can extract from us. They want us to beg for scraps while they feast on the fruits of our labour and then thank them for it. If you cannot see that by now, I am very sorry for you.

So this has left me in a bit of a bind. What do I do? I am nobody in the grand scheme of things. I am that faceless, nameless artist that put her pencil down years ago and picked it back up because I knew in my heart it’s what I was meant to do. Instagram will not even notice it if I disappear. However, I’m torn because a part of me knows it is possible (though very difficult to do) to connect with new people on the platform who could care about my work. But it doesn’t seem to matter what I do, I can’t reach them. The same advice on these platforms keeps getting passed around, but I should not be forced to kill myself to grow.
And that’s the problem: I will not damage myself for a malicious company’s profit for the sake of theoretical growth. As someone who has a history of burnout and mental health issues, I know what it will lead to and it is not worth risking it. I am done begging for scraps.
My decision is this: Going forward, Instagram is going to be a courtesy account. I will post once in a while if I feel like it, I will post major updates, and that is it. If you have enjoyed my work here, then please do follow me on any of my other platforms (though I will be extending the same courtesy to my Threads account as my Instagram).

If you have made it this far, thank you for your time. It means the world to me, a nobody artist that will carry on anyway.